Margo

I was talking with my friend Margo the other day.  She's the Area Coordinator for "Justice for Jonny Gammage," which was protesting the police murder of a young Black man.  She's also heavily involved in a lot of other causes: The PRIDE Alliance, which deals with LGBTQ+ issues, including Bash Back!, Take Back the Land, which fought against foreclosure, and for the interests of unhoused people, the Drug Policy Alliance, which fought for the decriminalization of all illegal drugs, CDS, which advocates for restorative justice, and probably some more that I don't even know about.

The topic of Marxism came up.  I expected her to be somewhat open-minded towards Marxism, but I was surprised when she said, with a sneer of disgust on her face, "Marxism!  Marxism is just the socially acceptable way of being conservative."

I asked her what she meant.  

"Look," she said, "There are only two sides in politics: the liberals and the conservatives.  Or you could call them the Democrats and the Republicans.  In every country, they're called something different: in England, it's Labor and the Tories.  In a lot of countries, the party that's called the 'Liberal' party is the right wing party.  But here in the States, the liberals are left and the conservatives are right.  And that's it.  There's nothing else.  Anything else is just daydreaming."

"Well, even if I accept that, and I'm not sure I do," I said, "How are Marxists conservatives?"

"You have to understand the difference between liberals and conservatives," Margo said.  "Liberals feel a lot of guilt.  They're motivated by guilt.  Or, you could say, 'empathy.'  Liberals look around in the world, and they see people suffering, and they empathize for the suffering people.  They see the animals and the plants suffering, and they feel bad about that, too.  You can call it empathy - I prefer guilt.  Guilt is stronger than empathy.  Anyway, guilt, empathy, whatever you want to call it, liberals are motivated into immediate action, through sensible government programs, to alleviate some of the suffering in the world.  So, we vote in politicians who pass laws, and these laws are executed by bureaucratic agencies-"

"To fix the problems?"

"No, not to fix the problems.  Well, occasionally, but usually not.  Usually we don't really fix the problems.  Usually, over the long term, the problems just get worse and worse.  But in the short term, we alleviate a little tiny bit of the pain that is caused by these problems.  It's not much, but it's something."

"Yes, that's about right," I said.  "Maybe the liberals are even making some of the problems worse, long term."

"Maybe so," said Margo with a shrug.  "I'm no prophet.  I can't see the future.  Maybe if I step on a butterfly today, it will cause a hurricane to hit China in 5023 AD.  But the point is, here and now, in the immediate short term, liberals get things done.  And they do so by putting social pressure on each other - by making each other feel guilty.  By making it socially unacceptable not to join them.  By shaming people.  Shame works."

I giggled a little and nodded.

"Now let's look at the conservatives.  What is a conservative?  A conservative responds to a liberal like this.  Either they say, 'Your empathy, and your guilt, and your morality are all stupid and meaningless.'  That's the sociopathic kind of conservatism, the totally shameless kind of conservatism, and in a way I have a kind of respect for it.  Or, they have a more sophisticated kind of rhetoric, where they say something like, 'I understand your concern, I really do.  I feel your pain.  I have all the empathy and guilt and altruism and moral feelings that you do.  But I can't join in your little moral crusade, because...' blah blah blah."

"Wait," I said, "Don't just say, 'blah blah blah'.  Complete the thought."

"Well, they'll always rationalize away empathy one way or another.  Usually it's with religion.  They'll come up with some kind of complicated theology that explains why doing what seems good - what your conscience tells you is good - is actually bad.  Isn't it ironic?  People like to say that they get their morality from religion but it's actually the opposite - they get their justification for immorality from religion.  They reinterpret the scriptures to be all about opposing liberalism - which is not what it's actually about, but you can't change their minds.  They're dug in.  They say - you can't alleviate anyone's suffering, you can't change the world, you can't make it a better place, and that any attempt to do so is sheer pride.  Of course they ignore their own pride, in being so cock-sure that they know everything that's going to happen.  They're very fatalistic.  You can't help people, they say, because of human nature.  Some of them call it Original Sin.  You can't help people in this world, this fallen world.  Maybe in the future, at the Second Coming of Jesus, we'll have thy Kingdom Come, and the lion will lay down with the lamb, and we'll have peace and freedom then.  But not in this world."

"Then they'll say that school lunches and nurses and libraries and hospitals are all actually tyranny - that, however well-intentioned these programs may seem, with the correct analysis, you can see that by supporting these programs, you are maintaining and strengthening the status quo regime and ceding more and more authoritarian control to it.  So this way, these kinds of conservatives get to have the fun of the sociopathic conservatives - they get to be edgy and controversial and transgressive - but they also get to be self-righteous.  That makes them much more stable, in a way, than the sociopathic kind of conservative - sociopathic conservatism is usually just a phase, but religious conservatism just gets stronger and stronger as people get older."

"Okay..." I said, cautiously, because it was starting to dawn on me which way this was going.

Apparently she saw it in my eyes because at this point she said, "Yeah!  Don't you get it?  Marxism is just the same thing!  They read their little books, and they come up with one more incredibly complex religious theology by which people can justify ignoring their own conscience, and transgressing against the shame and guilt that their friends and family would normally put on them.  They say you can't help people through bourgeois, reformist politics, because you can't help people under capitalism.  That's just their way of saying 'Original Sin,' 'fallen world.'  That's their way of being fatalistic.  They tell me not to fight for laws that can alleviate any suffering because if I do, I'm supporting the bourgeois state, which is their way of saying that I'm supporting Tyranny.  They tell me not to bother fighting for women's rights now, because the only way women can emancipated is after the revolution.  They say, don't fight for Black people now, because Black people can only get justice after the revolution.  \Don't fight for LGBTQ+ people now, because LGBTQ+ can only have justice after the revolution.  Don't fight for the elderly, don't fight for the poor, don't fight for the disabled, don't fight for veterans, don't fight for addicts, don't fight for the chronically ill without health insurance, don't fight, give up.  Join our little book reading club instead.  And if I do fight, they accuse me of 'identity politics,' of 'single-issue politics.'  They're just a bunch of pontificating pontiffs issuing their edicts to the faithful, telling us to wait for their own messiah to come out of the sky and save them, and I'm supposed to believe them just because they say so.  Just wait, just wait, the messiah will come.  Of course, even if they got their revolution, which will never happen, but even if they did, and somehow they were in charge, they would just make up some new excuses why there'll be no justice now and we shouldn't bother fighting for it.  Well, I'm sick of it.  I'm done waiting."